Superpowers might give superheroes a very specific experience of space. Some examples of spatial machineries in comic books and movies confirm this idea. The superheroes are often confronted with original cartographic issues and often invent very precursory geospatial devices. So here are already Supermap and Batmap, before possibly, if you dig into your old Marvel magazines to find…
Quand la Google car a parcouru Earl’s Court Road, à Londre, elle surpris le TARDIS, célèbre machine à voyager dans le temps et l’espace, aux allures de « Police Box », utilisée par le Doctor Who. /\ When the Google car mapped Short Earl’s Court Road, London, it caught the TARDIS, famous Doctor Who’s time machine and spacecraft, which looks like a Police Box.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is a comedy-drama written and directed in 2014 by Wes Anderson, and inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig.This movie was entirely filmed in Görlitz and other parts of Saxony as well as at Studio Babelsberg. This film tells the story of a grand hotel in Art Deco style, which experienced…
Rocky, Yoda or The Little Prince are not the only fictional characters who have been materialized. Superman and Lois Lane have also their own materialization. Even if Metropolis, the city where Superman lives is fictional, a city in Illinois has the same name and beyond this resemblance, the city host… Superman and Lois Lane! Rocky, Yoda…
Avec « Chaos : ordre et désordre » l’édition 2014 de Géocinéma, le festival de cinéma organisé par les géographes bordelais, invite les spectateurs à plonger dans l’abîme et la confusion pour revenir ensuite à la lumière et au monde. Dans un temps marqué par l’incertitude, la figure du chaos révèle la crise de l‘ordre qu’il soit social,…
In 1925, Abel Gance was the first director to use three cameras for shooting his movie Napoleon. By the juxtaposition of the three images he obtained a very large screen, three times the traditional format. This process, called « Polyvision », allows to increase not only the area shown by the images, but also to multiply the…
Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2 are 1992 and 1993 movies realized respectively by Penelope Spheeris and Stephen Surjik. The first one tells the adventures of Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers) and Garth Algar (Dana Carvey) who host a TV program from a cellar in Aurora, Illinois, USA. They attract an unreliable producer’s attention. Moreover, Wayne…
The Dictator’s Guns is a 1965 French aventure movie directed by Claude Sautet. Jacques Cournot (Lino Ventura) is requested to assess the Dragoon, Mrs Osborne’s yacht, in the Caribbean. When the ship is stolen, Cournot is given the mission to find it. During the search, Cournot uses several maps. L’Arme à gauche est un film…
Chinese puzzle, the latest film by Cédric Klapisch is certainly not the first film to put Google Maps on screen. We did not attempt a systematic inventory of the Google map service apparitions in movies, but in 2010 Where are the Morgans? already used a sort of fake of Google Maps. Chinese puzzle may be…
All works of the artist Till Roeskens proceed at the beginning from geography. When he chooses to use maps or landscape views, this is less for their aesthetic quality as for their primary function: restoring the form and the arrangement of space. But Till Roeskens always place « at man’s reach », i.e. at the level of…
While the 2nd opus of the movie « Hunger Games » is released in France, we come back to the first part (2012). Alors que le deuxième opus du film « Hunger Games » est à l’affiche fin novembre en France, nous revenons ici sur le premier volet sorti en mars 2012.
« Immortel (Ad Vitam) » is a French sci-fi movie directed in 2004 by Enki Bilal, designer of world famous comics. It is one of three films directed by Enki Bilal, all directly inspired by his works, the atmosphere that emerges and their imaginary geographies. The stories all take place in a more or less distant future,…
There is no representational spatial machinery in Gravity, the very impressive film by Alfonso Cuarón. No map, no device for locating characters, no screen for designatind targets. There is no computing tool in this sophisticated but somewhat abandoned technological world where manuals are in binders and where you crank up the retrorockets. In Gravity, you…
The Emperor’s New Groove is a Disney picture on screen in 2000. Transformed into a llama by his servant Ysma he just fired, Kuzko starts a race to find an antidote into the palace. The race is represented on a map by the routes of different characters … The map joins the territory when the line…
From 16 October 2013 to 26 January 2014, the exhibition « Pasolini Roma » holds at the Cinémathèque française in Paris. This exhibition proposes six sections corresponding to different periods of Pasolini’s life, especially in Roma, which was both the place where he lived from 1950 to his death in 1975, and the place where he made…
From 16 October 2013 to 19 January 2014, the exhibition « Astérix at the BnF » holds at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris,. This exhibition proposes a wide number of original sketches, videos and many by-products of Asterix’s world. It gives an occasion to pinpoint the use of maps and spatial means in one…
Jacques Tati directed Playtime in 1967. It his one of the 6 full-length movies of Tati that are briefly presented on this site. Modern space has always been a question of Tati’s cinema. Playtime is one of his movie where he develops an actual spatial thought. Playtime est un film réalisé par Jacques Tati en…
A film director meets an anthropology student who studies kiss mapping Une réalisatrice rencontre un étudiant en anthropologie qui étudie la cartographie de la bise
« Walkabout » (La randonnée) is a film by Nicolas Roeg in 1971. Its screenplay was written by Edward Bond from the novel by James Vance Marshall, published in 1959. The film contrasts the wide open spaces of the Australian bush to urban areas of western cities. This contrast of spaces allows the filmmaker to oppose two…
« The Trial » is a film directed by Orson Welles in 1962. In this adaptation of the eponymous novel by Franz Kafka, Orson Welles, who respected almost the entire story, shows distressing spaces of modern states bureaucracies after the Second World War and the experience of the atomic bomb.. « Le procès » est un film réalisé par…
Spy Game is a Tony Scott film where the map (and the satellite image) plays an important role both as an object of decoration that as a key element of the outcome of the plot. Spy Game est un film de Tony Scott où la carte (et l’image satellite) joue un rôle important tant comme…
Invasion is a film directed in 1969 by the Argentine film director Hugo Santiago, in collaboration with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. The film tells the story of a city, imaginary or real, besieged by powerful enemies and defended by a handful of men, who maybe are not heroes. They will fight to the…
Dirty Harry is a 1971 American crime film directed by Don Siegel. It’s the first in the Dirty Harry film series. San Franscico Police Department Inspector « Dirty » Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), opposes Scorpio, a serial killer (Andrew Robinson). We can find several spatial machineries in the movie : maps, plans, model. Moreover, we note many…
The exhibition « Le monde enchanté de Jacques Demy« which takes place from April 10 to August 8, 2013 at the Cinemathèque française in Paris, offers the opportunity to see closely the world of cities of this French filmmaker, who died in 1990. Jacques Demy, close to the « Nouvelle vague« , was a producer, but also a screenwriter,…
The exhibition « Macchiaoli 1850-1874. Italian impressionist? » which held at the Orangerie Museum in Paris from 10 April to 22 July 2013, offers to see the influence that some representatives of this Italian art movement had on filmmakers, especially for the representation of landscapes. The pictorial movement Macchioioli developed in Florence during the second half of…
The Cubic site has relayed the announcement by Google that Hashima (or « Battleship ») Island is now visible on GoogleStreetView. The Hashima island is an old mine in the Japanese archipelago, located off Nagasaki, which was abandoned in 1974. Since that time no regular human activity takes place there. However the island has served as decor…
The 39 Steps is a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock adapted in 1935 from the eponymous novel by John Buchan written in 1915 and adapted several times to the cinema. This was the first major success of the « English period » of Hitchcok who attracted attention of the American public.. Les 39 marches est un film…
(e)space & fiction invites you to join the new Cinemaps session that will be held on Wednesday, 12 June 2013 from 18h to 20h during the SIG La Lettre meeting at ENSG in Marne-La-Vallée. An open contest is organized on this occasion. Post images or videos of cinemaps or geomechineries you have found in movies…
The day of the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe, considered today as one of the biggest stars of American cinema, California received the first images of Mars. How could one fail to notice this dual event occurring on the same day, that the American entertainment world, and especially in California, wanted to produce as well…
We present here two recent French projects of cultural mapping. The first is developed by the association of libraries of the Ville de Paris. The second named Géoculture, a very ambitious cultural Web and mobile service with a mapping tool that aim to give access to the cultural works of a region. . Les initiatives…
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